Maria Balinska

Executive Director

Maria Balinska is the Executive Director of the US-UK Fulbright Commission. Educated in the US and in Europe, she joined the BBC in London in 1991, where she worked until 2009 as a producer and then senior editor focusing on international affairs. She returned to the US in 2009 on a Nieman fellowship at Harvard and subsequently founded Latitude News, an experiment in reporting America’s links with the rest of the world in new ways. In 2014, Maria joined the launch team of The Conversation US, a non-profit digital daily where the content is authored by academics and edited by journalists for the general public. For four years she was The Conversation US’s Editor-in-Chief, based in Boston.

Maria has had extensive contact with universities and individual academics on both sides of the Atlantic and is a strong supporter of the Fulbright mission of expanding international educational and cultural exchange and making it widely accessible. She is also the author of The Bagel: the surprising history of a modest bread (Yale 2008), described by the New York Times as a 'scrumptious book.'